Math Mentalist Devises Foolproof Gambling System

Requirements:Smart board/Data Projector

or Chalk & Talk

This is the most awesome way to introduce probability.

Mentalist Derren Brown devises a foolproof gambling system. He sends a girl , Kadisha, the number of a winning horse in race to be run the next day. It wins. He sends her the winning horse and race number 4 more times. She ends up with winnings close to £ 1000 before the final race. Derren convinces her to borrow money for the last bet. She does. She places £4,000 on a horse. Did it win?????

Watch Part 5 of The System

If you are not convinced Derren Brown can come up with a foolproof system for horse race tipping, let me explain The System. He took 7,776 e-mail addresses, divided them into 6 equal groups and sent each group a different number for a horse in a 6 horse race to be run the next day. Naturally, one group of 1296 had been given the winning horse number. This group was divided into 6 again and given the number of the ‘winning’ in a six horse race the next day and so on.

Race 1: 7776

Race 2: 1296

Race 3: 216

Race 4: 36

Race 5: 6

Out of 7776 punters, only one punter was given in advance five horse race winners in a row. Was it Kadisha. You will have to watch the Youtube above.

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And the Oscar for Best Mathematical Performance Goes to …..

Ben Zauzmer

Ben Zauzmer, a Harvard Applied Math graduate who has a 75 per cent success rate in predicting the winners of Oscar Awards every year, has correctly predicted 20 of 21 winners in 2018 Oscars, which is a success rate of 95%.

How does he do it? He gathers thousands of data points on Oscar ceremonies over the past two decades – such as categories movies are nominated in, other award results, and aggregate critic scores – and he uses statistics to calculate how good a predictor each of those metrics is in each Oscar category. Then, he plugs in the numbers and that gives him the % chance that each film will win in each category according to theBoston Globe.